Call for Proposals: “Is Abundance A Luxury?”

We welcome submissions for a seminar at the 2024 Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP) Conference, October 17-19 in New York City.

Full conference information: ASAP/15: Not a Luxury

This seminar explores what abundance means in a time of environmental degradation and class and racial inequities; how the arts function to generate, interrogate, or attack abundance in such context; and how the arts might ideally foster a more equitable sharing of abundance. Seminar participants will pre-circulate and then meet to discuss short (no more than 1,500 words) papers - broadly conceived - that examine how the contemporary arts in any medium engage with or contribute to questions surrounding abundance. Questions might include the following:

• Is abundance just another word for excess and therefore aligned with the reproduction of inequity and the production of luxury goods for the wealthy? 

• Is art's main function to create abundance in the context of such inequities? 

• Whose abundance is valued? Whose is demonized? 

• How might art intervene in or help dismantle inequity, bringing abundance to those who currently lack it? 

• Is abundance always a quantitative measure? 

• What might art provide that economic abundance cannot? 

• How should we understand the predicament of living in a world with an unparalleled profusion of artistic production, while so many wars and crises rage around us? 

• What is the role of art in a world that is fast decimating its abundance of natural resources, species variation, and human languages and cultures?  

With these questions and the ones participants bring, we aim to think through the theme of ASAP15, “Not A Luxury,” with an eye toward how the arts relate to an historic moment characterized by the proliferation of material and symbolic abundance as well as economic, political, and ecological damage.  

Please send a title, ~50-word bio, and 150- to 250-word description of your topic to houserh@utexas.edu by May 26, 2024. We welcome submissions from people in all career stages and those working within and outside academic institutions.